Curtains, a poem by Ruth Stone.

Post 637 - Ruth Stone was born in 1915 in Roanoke, Virginia and today lives in Vermont. In 1959, after her husband, professor Walter Stone, committed suicide, she was forced to raise three daughters alone. As she once pointed out, her poems are all “love poems, written to a dead man” who forced her to “reside in limbo” with her daughters. She's the author of thirteen books of poetry and the recipient of many awards and honors, including the 2002 National Book Award (for her collection In the Next Galaxy), the 2002 Wallace Stevens Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Eric Mathieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets, a Whiting Writers' Award (with which she bought plumbing for her house), two Guggenheim Fellowships (one of which roofed her house), the Delmore Schwartz Award, the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the state of Vermont, and the Shelley Memorial Award. In July 2007, she was named poet laureate of Vermont.

Elizabeth Gilbert tells this story about Stone's writing style and inspiration, which the poet shared with her: "As she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming ... cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, 'run like hell' to the house as she would be chased by this poem. The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would 'continue on across the landscape looking for another poet.'"


Curtains by Ruth Stone.

Putting up new curtains,
other windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.

What does it mean if I say this years later?

Listen, last night
I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams, "No pets! No pets!"
I become my Aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.

I want to dig you up and say, look,
it's like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.

See what you miss by being dead?